ASK DOC SEX-THE HEAVY METAL PH.D!

ASK DOC SEX-THE HEAVY METAL PH.D!

Laura Fissinger

Hello, faithful readers, and welcome to the regular new column by rock’s leading expert on perversion and good times, Dr. Sex. This month she is answering questions about the role of sex in heavy metal. “My role in heavy metal??!!" she asked innocently when given this topic. “Why I haven’t been on the road with a heavy metal band for a long time, honey. ” When we explained it to her, she laughed for 10 minutes. “Honey, that’s like asking what role the touchdown plays in the game of football. ” We certainly hope that Dr. Sex scores with you readers. Not literally, of course.

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Dear Dr. Sex: What’s the difference between sex and heavy metal? Are they the same thing or what? My school won’t allow us to talk about either, and my parents don’t want me to have anything to do with ’em, ever. —Confused.

Dear Confused: Well, the difference between sex and heavy metal is that sex probably won’t make you deaf, unless your partner shouts a lot or something. As for being the same thing, well, if you’re a 15-year-old male too scared or confused to have sex with a human being, they can feel like the same thing, for sure. Sex and heavy metal are both incredible releases for people, and if you’re bad off enough, one release can seem like another, you know??? I’ve sat in the front row lots of times during concerts by Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Ratt and so on. If the boys I saw around me weren’t in the middle of sexual release then I would be incredibly surprised, not to mention worried.

The important thing I want you to remember is that late in your life, should you survive Ronald Reagan and heavy metal madness, you will be able to tell the difference between sex and heavy metal, real easy. Until then, here’s a few clues. One’s hard all the time; one isn’t. One never changes its rhythm; the other has to change its rhythm pretty often or it won’t be any fun. One always has to happen with sweat and leather; for the other one, leather is an optional accessory. One is loud, the other is not always loud. Both can get you arrested. One takes a lot of experience and talent, the other doesn’t. Hope these help ya.

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Dear Dr. Sex: I’m a 12-year-old girl whose brother (age 15) listens to metal music all the time. It drives me crazy because the songs have such rude words, and gross sounds, too. Why does he think this gross music will turn girls on? It makes me wanna woof my cookies!

—(Unsigned)

Dear Woofer: No need to barf; lots of girls feel the same way you do. Your mistake is in the next-to-last sentence of your letter, and it’s the word ’’think.” Most fans and most bands want you not to think while you’re metalling out—that’s one reason so many people like metal so much.

Most girls like the metal bands that at least seem a little smart and polite and all that stuff. Led Zeppelin, for instance, was a metal band that a lot of girls loved. Nobody in Zep acted like a caveman in heat. The way that Jimmy Page and especially Robert Plant moved up on a stage, you got the idea that if you were a girl and you decided to get cozy with one of these guys, they wouldn’t treat you like their dog (unless you asked them to, of course). Robert Plant was macho enough to appeal to guys, but he was nice enough to appeal to girls.

The thing you have to remember is that if your brother is sitting in his room every day playing Ronnie James Dio or Judas Priest, he’s not particularly worried about turning women on (and if he mostly plays Motorhead he might never turn women on!). Mostly he’s just worried about getting all the craziness he feels out of his system—better he listen to metal than beat you up, huh? Heavy metal is like psychological Drano. It gets the clogs out. ☆ ☆ ☆

Dear Dr. Sex: Who were the first sex symbols in heavy metal? Were there any? I can’t remember anymore. —Flashback Frannie

Dear Fran: Good question, honey. But a better question might be, who isn't a sex symbol in heavy metal? If sex and power are pretty much the same thing in metal, it figures that if a guy is simply up there with a guitar in his hands and a sock down his pants, he has some power, and some sex.

You gotta wonder about this sex-andmetal thing though, doncha, looking at how homely these guys mostly are. And short, too—good grief, did you know that Angus Young from AC/DC is only 5'4"???!! Same with Ronnie James Dio. Some of these boys are so puny and ugly that when they say “C’mon baby let’s go do it” in one of their songs, you wanna ask them “go do what, exactly???’’

But ugliness, like loudness and fastness, is a great and useful heavy metal tradition. Teenage boys, as you probably know (especially if you are one), are often homely as hell. A young guy with a pizza face and scrawny bod looks at Ozzy Osbourne and he feels much better. Much better. He looks at Ozzy Osbourne and realizes that you can still be a man, a real big man with lots of power and women, and money, and be yucky-looking. Look at the first real sex symbols from heavy metal—Robert Plant from Zeppelin and Eric Clapton from Cream. Now they aren’t as ugly as Osbourne, but you aren’t gonna confuse pictures of them with pictures of Rick Springfield, either.

Seeing that you didn’t ask, I’ll tell you one of heavy metal’s secret appeals—it doesn’t change much. Oh sure, you get Rush doing art metal or Bon Jovi doing pop metal, but basically it’s the same four chords and the same loud noise and the same look for the guys—scraggly hair, funny faces, naked torsos, super-tight pants, socks in their trousers, some leather, some sweat, a few tattoos and voila! Who can tell if it’s 1984 or 1969 or 1974? No prob if it takes a band a long time to make it—it doesn’t matter if age makes ’em uglier, and they don’t have to buy new clothes!

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Dear Dr. Sex: Do all heavy metal guys have big you-know-whats or is it true what my big sister says about socks and sausage and vegetables? —(Unsigned)

Dear Detail Freak: Well, honey, you’d have to ask someone who had really squeezed the Charmin, if you know what I mean. But from all reports, we’d have to say that most of those bulges are not made of human flesh. At least not entirely. I think most metal fans are hip to the scam, but they go along with it because it makes teenage boys feel like there’s hope that they’ll, uh, grow, as they get older—and therefore, puberty is worth suffering through after all.

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Dear Dr. Sex: Why do so many metal guys have long hair? Do girls think it’s sexy? Do they wash it?

—Unhappy crewcut

Dear Crewcut: Remember that in the world of heavy metal, sexy is supposed to mean “animal.” Supposedly, it makes these guys look more like wild animals if they don’t cut their hair off. Besides, because fashion in heavy metal is not supposed to change, the hairstyles aren’t supposed to change much either. As for you girls, long hair can be a lot of fun to play with when you’re messing around. Then again, if the hair is really sloppy and tangled, you can get your fingers trapped and caught in it—and after that, the fooling around gets weirder than we can explain in a family newspaper.

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Dear Dr. Sex: What’s with all this leather and studs that guys wear if they’re into metal music? Sometimes when my boyfriend hugs me, I feel like I’m being clubbed by his outfit. What do I do?

—(Unsigned)

Dear Do: Why not buy yourself a leather jacket and fight studs with studs? As for why leather is so popular in metal-land, leather is manly— bikers wear it, hoodlums wear it, army guys wear it, cops wear it, criminals wear it. Leather is animal skins, too, so that fits into the wild animal bit. Curiously, Ted Nugent is the only one so far to wear leather loincloths and nothing else, like some guy out of the Flintstones. Someone else will do it soon enough, I guess. Get your rabies shots, girls!

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Dear Dr. Sex: My mom is one of those goddam women’s libbers and she hates the fact that I love heavy metal. It pisses her off when I watch MTV and see all those great-looking broads with hardly nothin’ on getting tossed around by my fave musicians. How can I convince my mom that this is all just fun?

—Video freak

Dear Freak: You can’t convince her, sonny, I’m sorry—girls just wanna have fun, sure, but getting tossed around isn’t a real popular method, you know what I mean? Look, because I’m a girl and a goddam women’s libber, too, I called in an expert friend of mine, a guy who works with heavy metal bands and likes ’em and everything, and this is what he had to say about the way metal-men treat their lady pals: “I don’t think there is sex in heavy metal. I think it’s a non-sexual medium. It’s a bunch of guys having sex with a piece of wood carved into a guitar. Well,

I guess you could call that sex, but to me that’s getting off, not having sex. It’s more like cartoon sex. I sure think metal doesn’t like women too much. It presents women in a way that adolescent men can deal with ’em—barefoot and pregnant or ready, willing and waiting in the backseat of a car. The women in heavy metal are two-dimensional, unless you can count a pair of huge heaving breasts as a third dimension. It’s a bunch of boys laughing about girls in a locker room.”

But our expert also says that metal isn’t quite as allergic to women as it used to

be. He says metal audiences used to be 80 percent males, but they’re closer to 50-50 boys and girls now. Partly that’s because women’s lib says anything boys can do—including being a metalhead— girls can do, too. And partly because there’s a lot more pop in metal music these days, and the boys who play this pop-metal are a little prettier than guys in bands like Rainbow or Black Sabbath. So the boys get their macho quota but girls can get crushes on the guys and feel more comfortable with the prettier music. ☆ ☆ ☆

Dear Dr. Sex: Is it true what they say about groupies? And what about girl heavy metal players? I’m a guy, so I couldn’t be a groupie for guys, but I’d be more than happy to be one for girls—if I can’t play for ’em on my guitar during a show, I’d be happy to play with ’em afterwards!

— Willing

Dear Will: That’s big of you, kid. I’ll answer the easy question first—in metal today, there’s Lita Ford, Girlschool, Rock Goddess, Wendy O. Williams, and that’s about it. It’s getting a little better, they say, but what it comes down to is that most metal guys think womens lib sucks and they don’t want any girls in their locker room. And because lots of girls wanna get guys, they act like they don’t wanna come in the locker room anyway, even if they secretly do. Anyway, most of the girls look faaaaabulous in long hair and leather, so it’s only a matter of time.

As for groupies—our experts say that most of the real sex in heavy metal is backstage, not onstage. The rumors are awesome, aren’t they—Motley Crue and wine bottles; Gene Simmons and the par-

ty he threw to celebrate his one thousandth conquest; Jimmy Page and anything on two legs; Robert Plant and the mudsharks; David Lee Roth and his paternity suit insurance; the girl in one metal stage act that gets her throat pretend-slit. I suppose anything we could imagine has been done by metal men and their special friends—but I think it’s metal music’s big ego that started the rumors that they are the only ones that do these wild things. Truth is, Will, bankers write the kinkiest letters to Dr. Sex. Bankers have to get up earlier in the morning but it doesn’t mean they don’t have wild nights. And bank presidents don’t go around telling people what they’ve done—rock stars may get jobs because of their naughty reputations, but bankers will lose theirs if the word gets out. To any young girls out there thinking about being groupies for heavy metal bands, I ask you to think about what kind of germs grow in dirty, sweaty leather. Gross, huh?

Dear Dr. Sex: We think you're good for a laugh. Would you please rate the sex appeal of some metal stars for us? —Easily Amused

Dear Easy: The good doctor loves to think about sex, peeled or otherwise.

Def Leppard: Young. Too much lipstick in photographs. B

Van Halen: David Lee Roth has pretty hair and great taste in sausage. B + Accept: Refugees from a hardware store in Yankamah, Ohio. CAC/DC: For knee fetishists only. COzzy Osbourne: Yuuuuuuuuuuuck. D Motley Crue: They know lipstick and rouge better than Revlon.8 Lita Ford: She’s got legs, and she knows how to use ’em. B

Scorpions: Nothing that would scare you in a back alley. 8-

Quiet Riot: Under the stupid clothes, a pretty cute hockey team. C +

Ratt: Frequently chased by sex kittens. 8Girlschool: Homely, but they don’t care. Also, great legs. 8

Twisted Sister: Dee Snider has the best hair since Janis Joplin. 8 +

Triumph: Three Dog Night, risen from the grave. C +

Judas Priest: Aw, Rob, make a fist for me, honey. C +

Billy Squier: Not really metal, which is probably why he’s handsome. ARush: The haircuts help. C Black Sabbath: Virginity suddenly looks like an option. D

Ronnie James Dio: Tiny Tim, feeling mean. D +

W.A.S.P.: P.U.! P.U.! C-

Iron Maiden: After you iron, how about

some sweeping? C +

Motorhead: Not as scary as you might think. C +

Krokus: Whoever said Switzerland was

neutral was lying. C-

Kiss: I think the make-up helped. C